Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

i think melissa's criticism are valid, even if they dont totally diminish the show in my mind. if you're gonna make a show about powerful white people yet again then you leave yourself open to that. but i think they (the writers) are trying pretty valiantly to avoid the standard 1960s tropes, those condescending progressive tales of the 60s as "when it all changed."

before this evolved into hack n slash, i was very on board with the points on the laziness of this show to set dress with "period" characters that aren't really periodsigh xpost, just agreeing with ryan

yah, i think a vast majority of the "you have a FEMALE COPY WRITER?!" over the past few seasons has come from the old, dumb white clients that come in for a meeting. nobody in the industry seems surprised.

moving on, I'm hoping that Bert's admonishment at the end of the episode means that we're going to get more forward thrust till the end of the season now that we've established where all the main characters are in relationship to the end of last season.

it seems important to me that in the beginning sterling cooper wasn't a particularly big, important, or good ad agency, and was getting by pretty much on don's brilliance alone. if they were forward-thinking in the slightest then it would be a completely different show (or couldn't even exist at all), but as it is roger's already coasting and bert is in charge of the day to day despite being a hundred and fifty years old, so it makes sense that it's a situation where change is going to come especially slowly.

I think it's important to remember though, as far as progressive hiring practices and coming to accept the modern era, there is no top down desire to do so (and that's where it would likely come from). Lane and Joan run the company, but they're mostly focussed on keeping it together and not so much concerned with bringing it into a new era creatively.

melissa's critique makes no sense. the show is explicitly ABOUT how this particular social group isn't involving black characters & when peggy tries to do so, she does it in an awkward manner. its not accepting of these issues, its drawing our attention directly to it. That even the addition of a black character doesn't really impact their social lives whatsoever etc.

one of melissa's critiques is that the show is anachronistically tepid in the show's acceptance of a mixed race office/social world in direct opposition to the more broad mores of the time and that it's ignoring more complex issues in favor of soap opera. that resonates, is accurate and is more or less damning depending on what you're watching the show for.

I think you're denigrating the show by using the term "soap opera", as though it was doing this as a cheap lot device and not as an exploration of character and theme. I think Melissa's critique is fine as long as its accepted that she's hoping the show is different from what it wants to be.

I'd also like her to explain why this is wrong:

In the real-world history of Madison Avenue, 1967 was the year in which the industry’s racist past started coming home to roost. In the fall of that year, data was released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showing that minority employment in advertising had barely changed since 1963. And come January and March of 1968, the EEOC and the New York City Commission on Human Rights dragged executives from every major agency in front of the cameras for weeks of public hearings, exposing the shameful discrimination practices of the industry, filing lawsuits against several of them. And then, very soon after those hearings, Madison Avenue finally, finally, began to grasp what had been going on all around them.

as she alluded to having a large number of problems with the article that came (which is posted above), I'd like her to expand upon that.

I'm okay with the female women in advertising thing, because again, this show is interested in exploring Peggy's growth. Honestly, it's been a number of years (chronologically) since anyone's really cared that there is a woman copywriter. Last season some men bucked at her giving orders, but she's also become de fact second in command in the department (with the power to fire someone, mind) in about 3 years. The only people who have really been questioning of her being a woman are old, white, dinosaur clients who are, themselves, desperately trying to figure out what in the hell "kids these days" like.

Alyssa Rosenberg (who is not a fan of the show) said an interesting thing a few weeks ago. The historical events that have taken place so far that any of the central characters has cared about all happened far away, and very few of them are really paying attention to the riots and the protests about race that are happening in their own city. I think that's a pretty big part of the show in that affluent white people at this time (and in the present, really) can basically ignore the rest of the world by isolating themselves from it through money. It's not just that SCDP is slow to adapt because it's conservative, it's also because the partners (save Lane, I suppose) are all well-off and able to live in a little bubble.

Thinking about where they're going with Dawn's character, surely the possibility of lonely Laine cracking onto her and possibly actually having an affair with her is quite high? They've been exploring his somewhat conflicted attitudes to race more than most of the other characters, except Peggy. Most of the characters seem either moderately racist or they're like Don and show no signs of caring one way or the other.

one of melissa's critiques is that the show is anachronistically tepid in the show's acceptance of a mixed race office/social world in direct opposition to the more broad mores of the time and that it's ignoring more complex issues in favor of soap opera. that resonates, is accurate and is more or less damning depending on what you're watching the show for.

no, melissa's critique seems to be that the show is "anachronistically tepid" wr2 these things in comparison to a few acknowledged trailblazers. that may be accurate, but i don't find it particularly resonant or damning. honestly, i think that mad men captures the day-to-day mores of its time & place pretty well. it concentrates not on the reactionary or progressive extremes, the entire tapestry of culture, but on a few small people caught somewhere in the middle. that seems a valid strategy to me.

1. My critique is that the show is about the most boring ad agency in New York when it could be about a fictionalized BBDO or JWT, to be honest. I mean, for all that my problems with the show rest on criticisms that may come across as sociopolitical in nature, my biggest problem with the show is that it's boring and I hate all the characters and I don't understand why there is a tv show about them. I'd rather watch fictional Caroline Robinson Jones as a character. I'd rather watch fictional Mary Wells Lawrence. I hate that Mad Men exists and yet I'm never going to see something like their story play out, because it's what I'd find compelling and because it's such a missed opportunity. I straight-up don't understand what's compelling about watching a show about a middling ad agency with middling aims which will never actually get to the interesting stuff that was actually happening in the ad industry in the 60s which doesn't cover the perspective of anyone whose perspective isn't usually covered by tv or films set during the era. Don Draper would have been the lead character in Mad Men if it had been a movie made in 1960. So what's the point, really? Like idk y'all are missing the point that I just think the show is bad and boring and I wish it were better. I mean, not that I don't think it isn't actually gross with respect to women and POC and isn't anachronistic in many respects, but I'm not just pissed off because I want it to tick some social justice boxes for the sake of being more diverse. I want it to be more interesting to watch.

2. Somewhere up there someone called me out for comparing Peggy to trailblazers and then unreasonably complaining that she falls short, which honestly makes no sense to me. Because while there were far more women in advertising at the time than Mad Men suggests, the ones who did make it as far as Peggy were basically rock stars. None of the women who worked general accounts were as mediocre at their job as Peggy appears to be, because blah blah had to be twice as good to be seen as half as good as their male counterparts. Maybe she's about the level of a low-level minion on women's accounts in terms of her displayed skill. I brought up Mary Wells because there was that scene earlier in the season where Roger claimed that Mohawk would want someone handling their accounts who had a penis. But if Mohawk/Roger was paying any attention to the competition (Braniff), they'd know that Wells had just completely revitalized them and it's weird that Roger wouldn't say something like "we could sell you to them as our own Mary Wells".

3. I have problems with the conclusions that that Slate article draws based on his perception of the Mad Men characters and historical statistics. As if Roger doing blackface has anything to do with the hiring practices of SCDP (seriously, want to venture a guess as to how many current partners of major companies have done something as gross wrt race as blackface?). As if the show is skill with respect to how it handles race by not really handling it at all. As if the absence of a story can be a statement in and of itself (spoiler alert: it can't be, or else Friends and Girls are also really nuanced portraits of race in the 90s and 10s). I'm tired of people congratulating Mad Men for having the bravery or something to be all white. It's just gross, especially coming from a white dude on Slate (who seems to fancy himself an expert on race relations à la Tim Wise). It's one thing to me to defend the accuracy of SCDP being all white (sure, it's plausible), it's quite another to claim that that in and of itself is a powerful statement on race rather than the absence of one. I mean sure, it might be Matthew Weiner's justification (see: his justification for getting rid of Sal and thus the presence of all LGBT issues on the show), but it's a poor one. Ultimately, my point is that if you can both historically justify the show being all white and just as easily historically justify having some (really interesting) characters of color, why on earth would you go with the first option? Why would you continue to go for the first option as the show is entering its fifth season and 1966?

Matthew Weiner has made some gross comments about how the ad agency is "still" all white so I think the answer is that he thinks he's doing everybody a favor and that he really is making some sort of trenchant commentary about race in corporate America by not having any characters of color, because somehow he thinks he's incapable of telling the story in such a way that SCDP's hiring of a character of color doesn't end with "and then racism was over, the end". Because clearly the answer to the after school special grossness of how race is often covered in things like this is to just not have people of color in your stories at all.

I mean, for all that my problems with the show rest on criticisms that may come across as sociopolitical in nature, my biggest problem with the show is that it's boring and I hate all the characters and I don't understand why there is a tv show about them.

nah, i like long, thoughtful posts. wish there were more such stuff on ILX. fwiw, i agree with you that there's nothing terribly remarkable about mad men's approach to race and gender. it's just another show about mediocre white people living mediocre lives. but, see, i was never sold the idea that it might be any more than that. i never saw anything more than that in the show. i like it for what it is, with the understanding that it's really just the thousand thousandth variation on the same old thing.

so your last round criticism, while undeniable, still doesn't really "resonate" for me. yes, i wish american TV were better. i wish it were more curious, smart and brave, that it weren't so complacently focused on stories about middle class white people going through the same old relationshit. but that's a criticism of american television, not of mad men in particular.

the one thing i can't deny or wave away is your point about mary wells and braniff, especially as it plays into SCDP's acquisition of an airline client and peggy's struggles to be taken seriously by clients. the show's ignorance of or decision to elide people like wells is kind of shameful.

for ex. if the food tastes bad, I don't continue eating it and ordering more so that I can continue to complain about how bad it is to the people at the table next to me.

I think it's p. normal for people to keep up with zeitgeist-y things even if they dislike them, particularly if they feel the critical conversation is overlooking things they feel strongly about. substitute "the twilight saga" for "food" in your quote above and you've described 40% of my online interactions during 2009.